Beer: Brothers in Farms
Brewery: Brasserie de la Senne (Brussels, Belgium) / Two Roads Brewing Company (Stanford, CT)
Style: Grisette
6.3% ABV / N/A IBU

There’s a bit to unpack with Brothers in Farms, a double grisette with two different yeast strains supplied by Belgian brewery Brasserie de la Seine and Stanford’s Two Roads Brewing Company. For starters, there are actually two different versions of the same beer, one brewed in Belgium with assistance from Phil Markowski from Two Roads, and a second iteration brewed in Connecticut with assistance from Brasserie de la Seine. Each have their own character. Of course, collaboration brews are all the rage, but playing variations on a theme and seeing how a different brewing set-up can alter the character of the same base is pretty genius,

I’ve only sampled one of the versions- the Belgian-produced one. This is based on my own mercurial likes and prejudices. Two Roads has a fine track record of churning out sturdy, utilitarian brews, but their Espressway Cold Brew Coffee Stout is a combination of two things I really like filtered into something that I didn’t enjoy at all. Brasserie de la Senne, by contrast, hasn’t steered me wrong yet – and their output is all the more impressive, since it’s essentially a two-man operation. I’m not trying to minimize the contributions of Two Roads here: This is a collaboration that speaks capably to the ethos of both operations and the brews they’ve created thus far. It’s not a wild overreach at all; it’s actually a rad rendition of the grisette style.

Brief aside: Why aren’t more breweries experimenting with grisettes? There’s like a thousand goses on the market, only nerds care about that style. Grisettes are quite literally a beer for the working class, typically brewed under the rubric of making something that is drinkable above all else, like a session IPA. After a hard day working in the field, this is what you quaff. And the double grisette is just a super-drinkable beer with a mid-range ABV. The one catch is that you should expect a bitter finish. This is where Brothers in Farms really excels – it kinda presents as a really mellow lager spiked with citrus, but there’s this persistent bitterness, more pleasurable than painful, that you can taste all around your palette. Vive la bière, la bière est bonne.